Menu for House GOP: Immigration à la carte

The House is still fumbling around on how its members will tackle immigration reform.

But two key House committees have at least laid out a menu of some options for the full chamber to consider when it begins voting on immigration bills this fall. Reflecting GOP wishes for a piecemeal strategy, each bill passed one at a time and, except for one, no Democrats voted in favor of them.

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POLITICO Junkies: Immigration reform in House: Going nowhere fast?

The collection of bills touches on a wide array of immigration laws, from enforcement to agriculture, E-Verify to the high-skilled sector except the big elephant in the room: What’s the House going to do with the 11 million undocumented immigrants?

Here’s POLITICO’s guide to those five bills, which passed when most of the focus was on the Senate Gang of Eight and its rewrite of immigration laws.

Border security

Of the five immigration bills that have cleared House committees, the border security legislation has the best chance of gaining broad bipartisan support.

The Border Security Results Act calls on the Department of Homeland Security to create a plan to make sure that within five years, at least 90 percent of all illegal border crossings along the southwestern U.S. border are apprehended. The bill also lays out several ways to measure how well security is improving along the border — such as the amount of illicit drugs seized by Border Patrol agents.

It’s a far cry from the border security plan in the Senate’s Gang of Eight bill, the final version of which would cost roughly $46 billion to double the amount of Border Patrol agents, direct the completion of the southwestern border fence and require other security measures. That plan, from Republican Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota, doesn’t have many fans in the House.

“To throw money at the problem — which we’ve been doing for 20 years without success — it’s more of the same in the Senate bill,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas), a chief sponsor of the House bill.

The border security bill passed McCaul’s committee in May and has won praise from border-state Democrats who have scoffed at the resources in the Corker-Hoeven proposal.

“It’s a good plan on a number of levels,” said Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a freshman lawmaker who represents El Paso. “It treats the border in a much more rational, humane and fiscally responsible way than the Senate bill does.”

Agricultural workers

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), a key figure in immigration reform in the House, wrote legislation that would allow foreign agricultural workers to temporarily come to the United States.

The bill would allow immigrants to stay in the country for 18-36 months — depending on the position — to work in the industry. The cap is set at 500,000 visas, although that can be adjusted according to market needs.

Goodlatte, a former Agriculture Committee chairman, called his bill a “market-based approach that removes red tape, streamlines access to a reliable workforce and protects farmers from abusive lawsuits.”

But Republicans also set clear incentives for farm workers to leave the United States. For example, employers are required to withhold 10 percent of workers’ wages in a government trust fund, which they can retrieve only when they return to their home country.

And while the House bill allows current undocumented immigrants to join this new agricultural guest worker program, it lays out no pathway to a green card, and ultimately citizenship, like the Gang of Eight legislation does.

The bill passed the Judiciary Committee 20-16 on partisan lines. Goodlatte’s legislation did have a Democratic co-sponsor at one point — Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota — but he has since withdrawn his support.

Notably, there is no bill yet that creates a guest worker program for industries other than the agricultural sector. But Republican Reps. Ted Poe of Texas and Raul Labrador of Idaho are working on legislation to provide visas for temporary workers, a Republican aide said Monday. The bill is expected to be introduced after the August recess.

High-skilled workers

Increasing the number of visas for high-skilled immigrants is an initiative that traditionally wins support from both Democrats and Republicans — and the Skills Visa Act is a core component of the House GOP’s immigration strategy. The bill is backed by a slew of industry groups, among them Compete America, the Information Technology Industry Council and the Consumer Electronics Association.

On its face, the House bill for high-skilled workers is pretty similar to the Gang of Eight’s bill.

Both bills would lift the current 65,000 cap on H-1B visas — the House to 155,000, with an additional 40,000 for immigrants who graduate from a U.S. university. In the Senate, the cap is set at 110,000 — it can go up to 180,000 — with 25,000 more visas set aside for foreigners who earn advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or math.

And both the House and Senate would create a new visa for entrepreneurs, capped at 10,000 per year. The House’s legislation also doles at 55,000 green cards for immigrants with advanced degrees in STEM fields from U.S. schools.

Democrats, however, say the legislation falls short on several points. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), for instance, said that the bill doesn’t clear the current backlog of green cards.

Another source of irritation for some Democrats: Both the Senate’s comprehensive bill and the House Skills Visa Act seek to repeal the diversity visa program. To allay those concerns, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) added a provision that directs additional visas to immigrants from certain African and Caribbean countries.